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Podcast: New Books In Public Health
Episode: Elizabeth Pisani, “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS” (Norton, 2008)
Description: When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we interact with the world around us, what we do with whom and when and where and how often. Take the recent examples of the global spread of pandemic influenza (a respiratory virus spread in the air) and the epidemic of cholera in Haiti (which depends on lack of access to clean water to spread), and how in each case the spread of the infection says something ab...